ED » Stats NZ

Education Inflation Booms

Dave Guerin — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 23:02:31 +0000

The CPI was up 4.5% for the March 2011 year, with 0.8% for the March 2011 quarter. Education costs had the highest increase for the quarter of the 11 main CPI groups, up 5.7%. That 5.7% increase is the highest for education since the March 2000 quarter. Of course, since fees are usually set for the calendar year, almost all education inflation is seen in the March quarter, with zero inflation usually for the next three quarters.

The biggest increase was for tertiary education fees, up 6.4%, although ECE and schools costs were up more than 5% too. Last year, tertiary costs were up 6.1% in the March 2010 quarter, but once you factor in the impact of GST, real cost increases are actually less in 2011 than in 2010. Maybe this reflects some constraint in fee-setting, or simply that the increases in student services fees have peaked with most providers having separated out those costs and charged them separately. That might mean that the new legislation to regulate student services fees might be closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

News 5/8 – English Language School Stats, Chamber Music & Policy Analysts

Dave Guerin — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 19:22:47 +0000

Adventure Tourism High-profile adventure racer Nathan Fa’avae is urging NMIT not to cut an adventure tourism programme, but Tony Gray, the CE, points out that it has high costs and poor completion rates. It sounds like a good candidate for cutting to me.
Too Many Policy Analysts? David Farrar over at Kiwiblog weighed in on the government’s new review of policy advice, suggesting that TEC was bloated.
More Money, Please NZUSA put out a release asking for more money. Really, I think that summarises it extremely well.
Joyce is Great On the other side of the youth spectrum, the Young Nats support Steven Joyce’s performance funding proposals.
Top Engineers 2 Waikato Uni mechanical engineering students have won ACENZ awards.
Pacific Scholarships John Key announced yesterday that the government was doubling scholarships, from 100 to 200, for people from Pacific Islands nations.
FITEC Awards FITEC, the ITO for forestry and wood manufacturing, has announced the finalists in its trainee of the year competition. I’ll run photos of the winner’s creation later today.
ELS Numbers, Chinese/Thai Visits The annual Stats NZ census of English language schools is out – the NZ Herald has comments from two people in the sector. SIT recently hosted Chinese agents in Queenstown and Aoraki Polytechnic hosted Thai agents.
Art Exhibitions The University of Canterbury and the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Material and Nanotechnology, in collaboration with artists and scientists, is offering a better understanding of nanotechnology through art.
The exhibition, The Art of Nanotechnology,opens in Christchurch at Our City O-Tautahi on 11 August. A Massey PhD student is just about to have his artwork assessed, along with a 38,000 word thesis.
Inaugural Lecture VUW has put Prof Charlotte Macdonald’s inaugural lecture online - the background is here and it’s on Harriet Gore Browne, wife of Thomas Gore Browne, the governor of New Zealand who took the colony to war in 1860 over land at Waitara. They currently have eight inaugural lectures online if you want some intellectual stimulation.
Chamber Music A trio from the University of Canterbury’s Pettman Junior Academy of Music has won the New Zealand Community Trust Chamber Music Contest for 2010. The Academy involves talented school musicians and gives them extra tuition and support – I wonder if other school students could be similarly supported by university departments in this way. I know that musical ability is often well developed early in life, but I’m sure many school students in other disciplines might also benefit from such extension.
Farewell to Pilot, Dredger Feilding flight instructor Jessica Neeson had a large sendoff at her funeral. She died last week in a crash during flight training. University of Waikato academic Prof Terry Healy died recently – he had a major part in developing the dredging scheme that led to Tauranga’s modern container port.
UCOL Grads Do Well 3 UCOL grads who have set up a design firm in Shanghai have come back to chat to curent UCOL design students, and are also speaking at Wintec’s Spark festival.
Spider Study Canty Uni researchers have been looking at how an African spider uses smell.

Unemployment Up, Enrolments ?

Dave Guerin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:26:23 +0000

The Household Labour Force Survey Dec 09 figures were released by Stats NZ this morning, with a big jump in unemployment to 7.3%, up 0.8% for the quarter. This is a very big shift – at the end of 08, most economists thought that unemployment would top out in the low 6% area, and earlier this week, they were picking 6.8%.

The tertiary education angle is that there will be continued high pressure for places in tertiary education this month. While the Survey released today showed that tertiary education participation was only up 2.3% from Dec 08 to Dec 09, more precise figures will start flowing from the TEC and providers in the next few weeks. I’ll provide updates as they arrive.